


Remembering to Eat

by 30MinuteLoop



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Angst, Comfort/Angst, Gen, M/M, S1E14, So much angst, Tilly doesn't leave people alone and that's a good thing, mess hall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-14 20:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13597299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/30MinuteLoop/pseuds/30MinuteLoop
Summary: Paul went to the mess hall before Ash did, and that's how they ended up meeting in the corridor.Everyone on the Discovery is struggling these days, Paul and Ash more than many. Tilly is the kind of person who will not let her friends struggle alone.





	1. we all miss him

Finally, it had gotten to the point where Paul could not physically work any more. He could feel his limbs shaking from low blood sugar, his head swimming. 

 _"Paul, you have to take breaks,"_ he could hear Hugh telling him, as he had who knows how many times before.

Had he not even ten minutes ago told Tilly that after she finished the latest round of calculations that _she_ had to take a break? At least an hour? She was getting slow after a long night shift, but she would never admit to needing a break.

 _“Remind you of anyone?”_ Hugh had said once, when he’d mentioned Tilly’s annoying habit of working so hard and so long that she started making stupid mistakes, just to impress him.

In any case, he couldn't work anymore, not like this, with memories of his love disrupting him every minute and feeling so lightheaded he could pass out. He put his left palm flat on the warm surface of the console, closed his eyes, and took a few slow breaths.

Paul locked his console. “I’ll be back in a while,” he told the ensign who had taken up Tilly’s work. Sliding a small padd into a slot on his belt, legs still shaking with fatigue and hunger, he slowly climbed the stairs and made his way down the hall to the turbolift.

 

***

 

The mess hall was unusually full. It looked like a full third of the crew was on break. As he stepped through the whooshing doors, people looked up from their conversations and _stared_ at him.

 _Okay. Focus. Food. Don't look at them._ He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Now, one foot in front of the other to the replicators. His knees were still quivering. How long had it been since he’d eaten? Twelve hours? Never mind how long it had been since he'd slept.

But now here he was at the replicator. What to eat. What did he like eating? Plomeek soup and grilled cheese was usually good. But definitely not now. Possibly not ever again.

Once he had brought Hugh plomeek soup and grilled cheese, after his doctor had gotten a concussion and a broken hand when the inertial dampers failed in a Klingon attack. It felt like an eternity ago, and yesterday, that he had walked Hugh back to their quarters, tucked him into blankets on the couch. Ordered soup and a sandwich from this very mess hall, only to return and find Hugh fast asleep in front of his favorite (god-awful) 22nd-century musical, _The Atrium_. Hugh was so tired. They had been so tired. Paul had been worried about him. Hugh had been putting on a brave front of wanting to get back to work ASAP but the CMO had put him on a mandatory 24-hour break -

"Lieutenant Stamets?" Tilly's voice came from behind him.

"Yes, Cadet?" he said, letting out a sigh that was not heavy enough to convey how tired of _everything_ he felt now. His vision was starting to swim again.

She stepped closer, into his field of vision on his left. "You've been standing here for, um, for a while. Are you feeling okay?" she said, almost a whisper.

Paul put a hand on the wall above the replicator slot. He leaned forward until his head touched the wall. Did she have to ask questions like this all the time? "No, Cadet, I do not feel okay." He closed his eyes and waited for her to go away. 

Instead, of course, Tilly stepped closer until he could _feel_ how close she was, even with his eyes closed.

"Can I order you some breakfast burritos?" she asked. "Full of protein. They don't taste too bad either."

Paul opened his eyes, still leaning against the wall, and tilted his head her way, a ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Yes.”

He caught her wider, satisfied smile as she turned to the replicator in front of her. "Two black bean breakfast burritos with roasted tomato salsa."

With that decision out of the way, though his head was still incredibly foggy and his limbs were still weak, he could push himself semi-upright again and mumble his order of a large coffee with extra cream. He was really looking forward to that. If only he didn't have to also hear Hugh's voice in his head, jokingly chastising him for his caffeine addiction...

Tilly put a hand on his shoulder, jolting him out of what had probably been an unusually long pause, again.

"Hey," she said softly. "I have your food, there's your coffee. Let's go sit down."

 _Get it together, Paul, you are definitely making a scene now._ He managed to stand up completely. "Thank you, Cadet," he said brusquely, taking the tray from her and putting his coffee on it. He turned toward the rest of the room, but he saw no empty tables and still, several people staring.  

Paul wished fervently to fall into the floor and never come out. Why couldn’t one of these hyperalert people, intent on just watching him now, have been in the medbay with Hugh that day? Someone who could have stopped Tyler, or who could have put Hugh in a stasis chamber in time to make a difference. Instead, it had only been him, lying uselessly in a containment field, _dreaming_ , fucking thinking he was _hallucinating_ Hugh’s death.

"Come sit with me and Joann," Tilly offered, taking his right elbow. He let her guide him across the room toward Owosekun, near the door.

A couple of the main engineering staff, though, got up and left their table just in front of them.

He stopped abruptly. "I'm just going to sit here. I don't want to ruin your lunch."

"Come on!" Tilly said, pleading a little. "We would love to sit with you.”

Paul could only manage to look at her. Obviously uncomfortable with whatever expression he was wearing - it felt like no expression at all - she looked away and let go of his elbow, her arms dropping awkwardly to her sides.

That felt awful, so he managed to force out around that lump in his throat, "Sorry.”

She nodded slightly, looking back. "I’m always here if you need company, okay?" She squeezed his shoulder. “You know that… we all miss him so much too.”

Her eyes were huge and sad and threatening his composure. He bit his lip, the lump in his throat doubling in size. "Thank you, Tilly. Really.”

She smiled a little, wistfully, and returned to sit with Owosekun.

Paul let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. Finally he could both be sort of alone, in this busy mess hall. He plopped down in the chair facing the stars and regarded the tray in front of him.

After devouring one burrito, he started to feel the shakiness in his body dissipate. At the end of the second burrito, the gnawing feeling in his stomach at least had something to gnaw away _at_. The burritos hadn’t tasted half bad either, as far as any meal eaten after your partner had been murdered by a Klingon in disguise, anyway.

He picked up his coffee cup and switched his attention to the report on his padd, or tried to. 

Because he could see Hugh sitting across from him on some lunch break, grinning at him as he hastily polished off an apple and some cheese before turning to the real prize, yet another cup of coffee. _"Well, I’ll look forward to reading your book, Don't Drink Your Sixth Cup Of Coffee Until You've Eaten Something Today: The Paul Stamets Health Plan."_

 _"Hey,"_ he had protested half-heartedly, just enjoying Hugh teasing him. _"I’m a successful and brilliant scientist."_

 _"There’s more than one way to be successful and brilliant, and some involve actually, you know, eating regular meals, getting some exercise, and not overdosing on coffee every day,”_ Hugh had said, giving him that heartstopping warm smile. _“In fact, it seems to work out okay for me.”_ He had gestured at himself as if he were the prime example of health. Well, he _was_.

Paul set down the coffee cup and tapped his fingers on the table nervously. _Focus. Focus._

All the data on Tilly's experiment on him was on the padd in front of him. She had restarted Paul’s heart somehow, on some odd delay of several minutes, after he had died. Somewhere in there there had to be an idea for how to get Hugh out of the network the same way.

He managed to get lost in the data, in Tilly's reports, the reason for all this research gradually fading into the background as his brain geared up.

But ten minutes later, he was out of coffee, and feeling he probably shouldn’t drink more. The eyes of the crew on him were starting to make him feel twitchy. It was time to get out of here. Time to get back into the safe cocoon of engineering, maybe make something work, maybe forget why everyone was staring.


	2. maybe i'm still human after all

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Paul runs into Ash.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been struggling a bit with the last chapter and in the meantime, this scene from the episode ran up and hit me in the feels, so.

Paul felt a little bit of purpose in his step, even energy, as he headed back to engineering. An idea was brewing.

_I have Ripper’s DNA in my body. That’s how I got connected to the network, and the growth of white matter in my brain helped me get trapped in the network. Hugh got stuck in the network after he died. Does he - did he - no, does he have tardigrade DNA in him somehow as well? What if Dr. Pollard does a brain scan on Hugh and compares it to mine - are there any similarities that would show if his DNA -_

Paul rounded the corner and came face to face with Ash Tyler.

(He had envisioned encountering Tyler more than once since he had woken up from the network. None of those daydreams/waking nightmares included running into him in the hallway. A lot of them had included setting quite intentional traps. Paul was not a violent man, but he had contemplated an awful lot of violence in the last few days.)

 _Is he supposed to be just walking around?_ Paul looked back down the corridor he had come from, as if a security team would run up to stop this from happening. He desperately wanted _somebody_ to stop this from happening.

Nobody was coming. He was frozen, all of the energy drained from him.

“Stamets, I’m sorry,” Tyler began, shaking his head minutely, rapidly. “Words are not enough, and I know that, but I am.” His eyes were wide, frantic.

An apology was the very last thing Paul wanted to hear right now.

Every bit of anger and pain he had been fighting to suppress was spinning up in his head. “You killed a good man. A man that I loved. Do you remember that?”

The memories were flashing before his eyes. _I remember the sound of his neck snapping, of you killing him. I remember you dragging his body out of the medbay. I remember you leaving me in a back hallway to sit on the floor holding him._

Tyler’s voice quavered. “I do now.”

Paul’s hands clenched into fists, digging his fingernails into his palms as he asked, “And does it gut you?” Paul meant to hurt Ash. But every word was knifing _him_ in the chest instead. And Tyler wouldn’t make eye contact. _Look at me, you bastard._ “Does it _sicken_ you?”

At that, Tyler looked right at him, nodding, on the verge of crying.

“Good.” It didn't feel good. Paul couldn’t keep looking into someone else's desperate eyes.

And now he noticed Tyler wore a plain blue uniform - like the one Burnham wore when she started working in his lab. She had been a mutineer with blood on her hands, now she was also someone he respected and...

“Maybe you’re still human after all,” he snapped, feeling the insult twist in his chest as he made his escape.

As he strode away, an aftershock of adrenaline made his legs weak and rubbery again.

And he suddenly realized that if Tyler were human - if he really _was_ a victim of sadistic Klingon genetic experiments - there would be no easy target for this blame, this anger, this heartcrushing sorrow at the loss of his dear doctor.

Paul would have nowhere to put those feelings. He would have to carry them forever.

By the time he reached the turbolift, he knew he couldn’t go back to work. He couldn’t start crying in engineering. But once he got out of the turbolift, went down the hall, tapped the code on the keypad, and was safely into his - their - quarters, he felt like he couldn’t stop.

 


	3. you have to be compassionate, or the future is already lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tilly's big heart is going to make her a great captain. She's the hero of the mess hall again when she steps up for Ash.

Tilly chewed on her lower lip, observing Stamets’ carefully blank face as he left the mess hall.

"I'm so worried about him," she said, not for the first time that day. "Usually he just works until he solves the problem. That's not going to happen with this, though. He needs to talk to his friends. He needs to take a break." She sighed. "I wish... well, I wish a lot of things, but mostly that we could all just take a week or two off." 

Joann nodded ruefully. "What would you do if you had a day off? Like a real day off.”

Tilly lit up, feeling the dream begin to grow in her mind, the possibilities laid out before her. But her smile faded, almost as quickly as it began. "I’d probably just sleep. But I don't think I could take a day off right now. The whole Federation is in danger." 

"If things were different, though," Joann said, "I'd spend the day in a spa. Massage, mud bath, face mask, everything. I'd be drinking cocktails at this amazing beach in Thailand afterward. Then - no wait - first, before all that, I'd sleep for like 12 hours. Then." She grinned, a real smile Tilly had not seen on Joann since they first arrived on Discovery. “Half a day at the spa, half a day at the beach getting drunk with my sisters and my best friends back home. God, I miss that.”

Tilly was about to mention the hot tub at her friend’s house in London, where she would invite Joann and her sisters and her friends if they wanted a night on the town, when the mess hall doors whooshed open again to admit one Ash Tyler.

When Stamets walked in earlier, people had watched him, but the room was lively with conversation. This time there weren't just eyes on Ash - people stopped talking too. It was like they were _shunning_ him. 

Tilly's heart broke.

Ash walked across the room and ordered his food quietly. A few murmured conversations and gasps punctuated the void that had opened up in the room.

She looked among the shocked faces of the crew, but nobody was moving. _How can they let him be alone right now?  
_

"I didn't think he would be _walking around_ ," Joann whispered in disgust.

Tilly's mouth dropped open. "Joann!" she hissed. Her friend ducked her head in embarrassment. "He's our friend."

She wanted to get up and help him, the way she had with Stamets. But: _Sylvia, control yourself!_ She heard the judging voice of her mother, every time she had said or done something her mother had deemed awkward. And then would come the silent treatment. It had always made her skin crawl.

Ash walked past tables of staring people, finally settling at the empty table Stamets had left a few minutes before. No, he looked so forlorn that it made Tilly feel lonely too. How many times had she sat alone at lunch as a little kid?

Tilly ate one more spoonful of soup and got up. “Sorry,” she said softly to Joann, as she took her tray and headed toward Ash. Now she could feel all the eyes in the room following her as she disrupted the stillness. She sat down at the table with him, as confidently as she could. _Sylvia, you are embarrassing me! Sit down! Be quiet!_

“You don’t have to do this. I’m okay,” Ash said, but he could hardly even look at her when he said it.

Her stomach clenched even as she tried to smile, gently, reassuringly. “How could that possibly be true?” She couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to have been taken over in the way Ash had - remembering killing a crewmate, someone who had been so sweet and wonderful. Hurting someone he loved. And then being punished for just being the person whose body was hijacked. “Just eat. And talk if you want to. I’m here.”

She caught a glimpse of the surprised and disgusted faces of her crewmates at the next table. She wanted to shout, _Being rude to Ash isn’t going to bring Hugh back! It’s not going to end the war! It’s not even going to make you feel better!_

Suddenly, a chair scraped against the floor. Tilly turned to see Keyla sitting beside her. Soon a few others were approaching and saying hello. Bryce sat down, shaking Ash’s hand and welcoming him back, and Tilly saw the possibility of a smile on Ash’s face. The clouds in his eyes dissipated a little.

 _It’s working!_ “Keyla, did I hear you were learning to dance salsa the other day?” Tilly asked brightly, trying to come up with some regular conversation to keep the mood light as people crowded around.

Keyla laughed. “No, but I spilled a whole bowl of salsa that I was trying to take back to my quarters for a card game. Bryce was there. He helped me clean it up.”

 _Okay, that's a non-starter!_ “I guess something just got lost in translation,” Tilly said.

Moments later, the friendly welcomes had wrapped up. The mood shifted, awkward and silent again. What did you talk about to someone who had been through whatever it was Tyler had? Tilly was out of ideas, and each second made her more nervous.

Ash seemed to absorb the silence as a rebuke, looking down at his food and poking at it studiously.

Keyla leaned toward Ash. “Ash, I think about that speech you gave at the party months back - I think about it all the time. It was a good speech.”

Ash nodded. “Yeah, I remember that. I was a little drunk, but - I remember.”

“We’re still here. We’re still fighting,” Keyla continued. “We know you are too.”

Now Joann came up behind Tilly and Keyla and put a hand on each of their shoulders. Tilly looked up at Joann. “I don’t really understand everything that happened to you,” Joann said carefully. There was a tense pause. “And I’m sure it’s going to be hard for everyone to adjust. But I really hope things get better for you. And we're going to help each other get through this."

“That’s right,” Keyla said. She looked around the table, her eyes bright. “I feel it here. We’re gonna be okay.”

The corner of Ash’s mouth twitched. _He doesn’t think he’s going to be okay._

Tilly wasn’t so sure things were going to be okay either. She only knew that it didn’t matter what the future might be like.

You had to be compassionate now, or the future was already lost.

And that thought gave her a lot of comfort.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you thought! I <3 comments.
> 
> This fic was inspired by @miss-chievously on tumblr - thank you!


End file.
